Monday, April 2, 2012

SCOM 2012 - Configuring the Service Level Dashboards

With System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2, we had very little to work with in the line of out-of-box- dashboards. As a result of this, I along with other members of the System Center community had to make do with customising solution accelerators and SharePoint sites to bring the data within the Operations Console into a transparent and easy to digest view. I wrote a series of posts on SCOM 2007 R2 Dashboards and you can check them out from the link below if you haven't already seen them:

Things have changed a lot since those posts though, and with the upcoming release of SCOM 2012, we have a huge amount of dashboard configurations to choose from (widgets, vicinity view etc.), right out-of-box. I'm not going to re-hash all of the functionality of these new dashboards as other community members have already done so but one type of dashboard I will post about is the new and vastly improved Service Level Dashboard. This dashboard is a drastic improvement on the last one and is so much easier to install and configure too.

For the purposes of this post, I'll presume you have already installed SCOM 2012 with all of the relevant agents and management packs and have configured at least one Distributed Application. It is worth pointing out that unlike the previous SLD version 2.0, you don't need to install any specific management pack and this feature is available as soon as you have installed SCOM 2012.

We know that Operations Manager helps deliver IT as a Service (ITaaS) and it does this through the Distributed Application (DA) model. When you have modeled your IT service into a DA, you then have a holistic view of your whole service that presents the service into a single entity within Operations Manager. If we have a single entity, it's logical to then assume that we can attach a Service Level Object to that single entity to report back on it's percentage uptime or downtime over any given period.

To begin, click on the Authoring tab of the wunderbar in the SCOM console, expand 'Authoring' and then click on 'Distributed Applications'. This should then give you a list of the Distributed Applications that you have configured and you can confirm here if the one you want is named and configured properly before you proceed.

Once you are happy that the DA is configured as you want it to be, expand the 'Management Pack Objects' view then right mouse click on Service Level Tracking and select 'Create' to open the Service Level Tracking wizard. This is where we will be creating a new SLA and assigning it to our DA.

From the first screen, enter a name and description, then click Next

At the 'Objects to Track' window, first click at the 'Targeted Class' section on the Select button and choose your DA from the list provided. Then in the 'Management Pack' section, choose an unsealed management pack to save the SLA into and then click Next

In the 'Service Level Objectives' screen, click on the Add button and then select the 'Monitor State SLO' option from the drop down menu

Now input a name for your Service Level Objective, leave the monitor type on Availbility and then choose the percentage of uptime that you want to assign for the SLA that is to be attached to your DA. Specify what states you want to be counted as downtime (or just leave the default of Critical) and then click OK to close the window and then click Next to move on

Confirm your Service Level Objective information is correct and then click Finish

When the wizard is complete, you will be presented with the screen below confirming all is good to move on

Now, click on the Monitoring tab in the wunderbar, right mouse click on the folder or location that you wish to create the new Service Level Dashboard into, highlight 'New' and then click on 'Dashboard View'

This will open up the 'New Dashboard and Widget Wizard' and from the templates provided, choose the new Service Level Dashboard option, then click Next

Type a name and description for your new dashboard, then click Next again

At the 'Specify the Scope' window, click on the 'Add' button to bring up the 'Add SLA' window. Then choose the SLA(s) that you want to add to the dashboard, click the 'Add' button and when finished, click on OK

Back in the 'Specify the Scope' window, select the timeline that you want the SLA to apply from (I've chosen 1 month), then click the 'Finish' button

In the final two screens, click on the 'Create' and 'Close' buttons respectively to finish the process

When the wizard has completed, you can then click on your new Service Level Dashboard and see the results as below

I'm also using the RTM version right now, but when I create an Service Level Dashboard with an existing Service Level Tracking object the 'Service Levels' windows stays empty. You maybe know what i'm doing wrong here?

You might want to try creating a new SLO and also opening the view in a new window to see if it is browser related or something deeper.

I've also found that issues or incompatibilities between language packs and locale's on the computer you are viewing the SLD from can cause viewing problems similar to what you are experiencing. If this is the case, ensure that the locale on your computer is the same as the locale on the SCOM Management servers.

Hi Kevin, thanks for the very useful info. I'm having a weird issue with the SLO dashboard. It seems to be working fine, but the data I see data seems to be in a different "time zone". I see some downtime at 4:00 AM in the SLO dashboard. If I run a report, I see a similar downtime at 12:00 AM. I've checked time settings in all involved servers and everything looks fine. Any tips on what could be wrong?

I haven't seen that issue myself before but I do know that if you have different Locale's configured on some of your SCOM management servers or even if the computer that is viewing the SLA dashboard has a different Locale, then this can cause these types of weird issues.

Hi Kevin. thank you for this and all other great posts!. I am not seeing any SLA in my dashboard view, It stays empty. I have recreated from distributed app to new slo. It shows in the service level tracking reports, but no data in the widget/dashboard. What am I missing here?

Make sure you have deployed Rollup Update 1 to your SCOM /OpsMgr environment before trying this again.

Once you have RU1 installed and all servers and agents updated with it, try creating a new DA with some different components. Then create a new monitor SLO for this DA. Once you've done this, check out the console again to see if the dashboard get's populated with the new SLA view.

If it doesn't, open the Web Console and take a look at the SLA dashboard from there. Also, try to logon as a different user or from a different SCOM management server and see if the dashboard data appears.

Finally, before posting on the Operations Manager Technet forums, check the 'Operations Manager' event log on the management server just after accessing the SLA dashboard and see if anything interesting turns up.

I'm seeing the same thing as Jose mentioned. It's a relief to see it happening to someone else. Just for clarity, I'm running the english version in EST zone in a relatively simple environment. There is something amiss in this view.

It may be a bug, but something similar occurred in OpsMgr 2007 R2 when the management server locale was different to the computer or server trying to view the dashboard from.

You will need to check that the locale of your OpsMgr management server(s) is the same as the SQL Reporting Services (SSRS) server and also the same as the client that you are trying to view the information from.

Very good article. After creating SLA Dashboards, SCOM sometimes shows the circular Green and sometimes shows just gray i.e., no Green or Red. However when I went to "Distributed Applications", I can see the application health is green. This happens on Operations Console. (SCOM with RU2)

On Web Console, the above SLA shows "grey" but in Operations Console it shows "Green".

i.e., the SLA Dashboards with "Grey" circular status in Operations Console appears as "Green" in Web Console and vice versa.

I tried this by created multiple SLA Dashboards in both SCOM 2012 with RU2 and SP1 beta. The same result.

The DB and Management Servers are in Healthy state and no errors/warnings regarding this in event log.

Thanks for your blog ... has been very usefulA query, I have problems with the console when I dashboard, console gets arrested, and I have to restart it again ....SCOM 2012 with SP3...can you help me....

Hi, there's a few things about SLD's I don't get, for example should the SLO's be monitors, collections or both? What are the pros and cons.

Also, there seems to be a few issues/bugs:1. Deleted SLO's sometimes remain in the SLD view even though they no longer exist in the corresponding SLT!2. Despite both the SCOM MS and the local machine (running the client) being set to the same locale/country there's still a time lag in terms of the last time displayed.3. In order to display the proper text descriptions for the SLO's in the SLD I need to change the client machine's language to English US. We're in Australia so that's not really ideal (SOE forces it back to Aus on reboot too).

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About Me

I'm a Microsoft MVP in the Cloud and Datacenter Management space and work as a consultant for Ergo based in Dublin, Ireland.

I really enjoy the fact that we are in a constantly evolving industry that requires us to up-skill as much as we can and one that provides us with new products and solutions each year to make the job all the more interesting and ever changing!